Thursday, January 21, 2016

You need to Understand the Basic Buying cycle ehh Buying Cycles

If you don't understand the buying processes you encounter in your service niche, you do not understand or have an effective business development process.

Great marketers work at getting prospects into the buying cycle earlier and earlier and basically taking them off the market from all those bounders waiting around for a one night stand, or put more delicately, the quick sale.

The bounder mentality just does not stop to comprehend the steps towards a sale and basically begin their thinking at the time of the particular buyer is looking at reviews and figuring out who they are going to trust and buy from.

Now remember, this site is intended to help small service companies and manufacturers improve their business development and their sale processes. The greatest part of Internet advice you will ever see is oriented towards helping retail locations succeed and restaurants and every other location that caters to the whim of folks zooming around and enjoying shopping and catching a snack and perusing cool stuff... this is not you, and the majority of advice is tangential to what you need to do.

There are a lot of companies out there whose front page consists of promotional offers and "call now for service". Now, the front page is not critical to search unless all the site's information is on the front page, and not critical unless you are using online ads that dump people on the front page and this is a money robbing mistake.

These concentration on the quick sale is a misunderstanding of the buying cycle and the many different step that homeowners go through before they are ready to go shopping.

Web visitors first encounters with your content as they are searching for answers about something they are concerned about, or something they see in social media that touches on an inkling they have. It depends on the theme and the 100 different ways to draw attention to that theme that helps create a search connection between you content and their intent; and this is arranged by being high on the search page with Google.
What do I mean by theme? I mean a broad issue around which another 100 stories could be told which would relate back to the broader theme. Like indoor air quality or IAQ. We talk about dominating  critical themes elsewhere but here we are relating any particular theme to the buying cycle.

So someone is searching for reasons for a musty odor like composing vegetation in a bedroom. Now they are not interested in special offers, or "schedule your appointment today" they are looking for content that gives them a sense of what might be going on. Now content like this that is part of a story which relates the real life experience of a customer could easily be matched up by Google because of the quite specific terms. And they are not showing up on the front page; but a blog post that when prepared through a strategic content creation system is meeting this web visitor around their subject and matching their intent.

And here is the big win. When people find useful information they are appreciate. This phenomenon is called reciprocity and it is in our nature as humans. And so if your content is useful and you offer a hook that gets their attention and that matches well their next step in their buying cycle; well you are on your way to winning hearts and creating influence

The type of buyers most smart companies want are customers who are discerning, who want top quality and professional services more than they want the cheapest price. Quality workmanship and attention to the fundamentals of a repair and cheapest price do not really keep company because the cheapest price depends on corner cutting on the fundamentals.
Yes, you hear about cutting profit to the bare bones, and cutting down on expensive overhead... this is BS for cutting corners. Companies in for the long haul understand the cost of doing business and overhead and the cost of top quality workmanship and the fundamentals of repairs and, while they do sharpen their pencils around expenses they are not cutting corners to be the lowest price.

I did not mean to get on that riff on pricing there, but wanted to underline the utility of understanding the buying cycle and creating strategic content around the steps in the buying cycle. The web visitors you meet working the buying cycle well, are the discerning buyers so that you are giving your company the best chance to meet the discerning buyer you want; first.

And it is your web visitor to lose. But you don't lose them if you understand the next steps in the buying cycle and help them pass easily, even over a length of time to become your buyer and your lifelong customer.

Understanding the buying cycle and utilizing this knowledge to meet and win new customers is
  • helping the chosen become aware, 
  • helping the aware to better understand what is happening
  • helping the chosen learn to discerning about the actions they need to take.
  • give them useful information around which to make smart choices and avoid faux solutions.
  • give them plenty of opportunity to explore your credentials
  • give them plenty of opportunity to check you out and your team
  • create your own unique systems to get them to connect to you, to stay in touch with useful information- social media? nurturing emails? a newsletter preferably a newsletter that you collaborate in... shared in email...
Understanding the buying cycle and thinking about strategic content marketing can help you win in the battle for the hearts and minds of your chosen web visitors, and you do this on a steady basis and you will have real problems on your hands. You will have to grow your company, and do more hiring, and train new managers... the small business owners work is never done.

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All right so who has a point to add here? This is critical turf for business owners to be thinking about. Leave your thoughts below.



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